3.31.2009

School at Home: Week 1

We completed our first week of what I'm calling "School at Home" with Alex. I can't bring myself to call it "homeschooling" so this feels better for me. I figured if I documented it all here then I have to actually follow through. Here was our week in summary:

It was Space Week. We started by checking out many, many books at the library on space and planets. We read all of them and talked about the planets and rockets. A few of the books I checked out were super easy ones that I thought he could read, and he did!

We worked on identifying "space words" like: space, rocket, planet, star, moon, etc. Alex asked to do an estimating project one day so I counted this as our math lesson for the day. We used star, moon and heart stickers and practiced estimating how many were in each bag. Anna played too.

Our big project was making a solar system. We spent most of the morning painting and putting it together. (See picture). Alex LOVED this. I was surprised in a matter of hours how quickly he'd learned the order of the planets and was ready to recite it to anyone.

We read about the first lunar landing and then watched some of a DVD from Netflix with footage. He couldn't believe that it was actually real and he was able to see it. Thursday we took a trip downtown to the Air and Space Museum and that was just a wonderful trip for us. I couldn't believe how much information he had retained during just three days.

The real kicker was I let him round out the week on Sunday by watching Star Wars--a movie he's been begging to watch once he turned five. I figured with his birthday on Saturday it was nice way to end the week and celebrate.

This week is Spring Week. So far so good! Lots of fun thigns planned.

1 comment:

Jon said...

Damn, Alex easily had a better week than I did. Can I go to school at home next week instead of working? That would be rad.